The views contained here may not represent the views of 24hGold, its affiliates or advertisers.

24hGold.com makes no representation, warranty or guarantee as to the accuracy or completeness of the information (including, editorials, news, prices, statistics, analyses) provided through its service. In no event shall 24hgold.com, its affiliates or advertisers be liable to any person for any decision made or action taken in reliance upon the information provided herein.

Any copying, reproduction and/or redistribution of any of the documents, data, content or materials contained on or within this website, without the express written consent of 24hGold.com, is strictly prohibited.

Even
if the so-called economy were "recovering," the people of the USA
would be stuck in a physical setting for daily life that has no future - the
nightmare infrastructure of subdivision houses, strip malls, and WalMarts, all rigged up for incessant motoring. Of
course, the so-called economy is not recovering because there is no more
cheap oil. If oil ever gets cheap again, it will be because nobody has enough
money to pay for it and surely you can connect the dots to what that hamster
wheel of futility means.

In
fact, the heart of our economic predicament is that the American economy came
to be based on the construction ever more suburban stuff, the financing of
which, especially the houses, became the fodder for an episode of epic
swindles that has left our banking system a hollowed out shell of accounting
fraud. In short, we built even more stuff with no future, and ruined our
society in the process. How tragic is that?

The
behavioral habits, practices, and consequences of being stuck in that living
arrangement may end up being at least as problematic as the physical residue
of it. It has left the people in a network of alienation, anxiety, and misery
that defeats exactly the mentality needed to break free of it. For the truth
is we're faced with a massive necessary re-ordering of daily life in this
country, and there is no vision or will to get on with job.

Among
the tribulations of this living arrangement is the utter loss of connection
between place and purpose often expressed in the phrase "loss of community,"
which is a little too abstract to me and fails to convey the tragedy of
individuals living with no sense of purpose -- and by that I mean duties,
obligations, and responsibilities to other human beings.

Obviously,
the whole idea of a single-family house by definition dictates a certain
disposition of things. It will lack the dimension and social relations of a
household composed of multiple generations plus non-family members, helpers,
employees, servants. And it should also be obvious that the single-generation,
single-family house is a product of mid-20th century industrial dynamism that
made even factory worker wage slaves rich by historical standards - Tom Wolfe
pointed out years ago that the average GM assembly line drone enjoyed more
sheer physical luxury at home than Louis XIV.

Put
the single-family house in the context of a suburban monoculture organized to
conform relentlessly to the dictates of single use zoning, and you get a
recipe for instant (and permanent) social dysfunction. Then, fill that house
with electronic diversion devices and a microwave oven and you end up with a
very few disconnected humans who rarely share a meal and exist, while
"at home," in a narcissistic vapor-realm of canned entertainment,
pornography, texting (i.e. melodrama created to fill a void of
purposelessness), and the sado-masochistic combats
of video games (a substitute for purposeful, virile endeavor), all floating
on a virtual river of relentless advertising.

It
always interests me to see the emergent purposeless of the American Dream
expressed so vividly in the television sitcoms of that mid-20th century day -
the very moment of its emergence. Ozzie Nelson of Ozzie and Harriet
seemed to have absolutely nothing to do except sit around the kitchen waiting
for somebody else to come in for a cup of coffee. He clearly had nowhere else
to go. The ennui of Ozzie Nelson was a source of mirth to busy hipsters who
savored the ironies of behavioral kitsch - loving what's horrible for the
horror it induces. But it really isn't so funny since it is a portrait of an
un-manned man trapped in utter purposeless and reduced to the pathetic
existential status of somebody endlessly waiting for nothing. (Cue Samuel
Beckett....)

Anyway,
that was then and it's all crashing down now in a great galumphing
debris-field of bankruptcy, psychosis, regret, obesity, and foreclosure. So
what comes next? They say that the millennial generation is the most
group-oriented, cooperative bunch to come along in the march of Boomers, Xs, and Ys. How much of this is
an hallucination of transient computer connectivity,
I don't know. The fact that it is so difficult for them financially to even
hope to form a household will surely be a defining factor in the choices they
make ahead about how exactly to inhabit the landscape. I think they will make
out better in this project than their Boomer forerunners, who started out in
communes sharing toothbrushes and graduated to dismal McMansions
in a geography of nowhere, while dedicating their
careers to the looting of posterity.

I'm
quite sure that many will rediscover a sense of purpose in the re-ordering of
social life that lies ahead, which includes a return to different household
arrangements and probably much more hierarchical social relations. Implicit
in the latter is the now-utterly-incorrect-and-taboo notion of someone
knowing their place. The catch is: you need to have a place in order to know
your place, and therefore know who you are - and in a society full of people
for whom place means nothing, there is little chance
of acquiring a real identity, other than the sham raiment of the
app-supported avatar life that has taken the place of being human.

I
had a fugitive thought the other evening walking through my beaten-down small
town in the late fall chill. I imagined that instead of the blue tomb-like
glow of television emanating from house to house that I could hear the
sequential music of parlor pianos, and voices singing to them, and of healthy
people coming and going from warm kitchens to fetch firewood, and of groups
of people gathered around tables for a meal, and generally of buildings that
were truly inhabited, not just storage containers for lives unspent. I grant
you it was a fleeting nostalgic fantasy. But isn't nostalgia just a state of
being homesick?

James Howard Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine.
In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis.
His nonfiction book, "The Long Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the 21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.

Wow, all this time I've been completely off-base!!! I had thought the demise of America was due the destruction of morals and ethics, the vilification of producers, the creation of the "entitlement" class, and an enormous government with a spending problem hell bent on trashing the Bill of Rights. I am so relieved to hear that our problems all stem from the fact that we live in a society which (still) uses the internal combustion engine, the price of oil is relatively high, and our cities are laid out to facilitate commerce!!

James, you've outdone yourself. Your writing inspires me to think, and it came to my thoughts that ~ The Pharaoh would have given half his kingdom to anyone who had offered him an air-conditioned van to travel 70 miles an hour down Interstate 80 in 100 degree heat. The average person in America didn't (and still doesn't) know what they had; and now it's all disappearing. What an INCREDIBLE waste of resources. Mankind could have been visiting other Universes by now ! !

Amen Brother Kunstler! We need more hell-fire and damnation modern-day Jeremiahs like yourself preaching to us against the ingrained evils of modern culture. We have come to be so inured to a way of life our grandparents would consider lazy, wasteful, slothful and evil. Not saying we need to become Amish, but sometimes I wonder if even that extreme wouldn't be better than what we have.

I, too, become worried and even alarmed to see TVs broadcasting 24/7 in almost every house in the neighborhood. If not a TV, then several computer screens. From the outside it looks like the inhabitants are being hypnotized, mesmerized. I enjoy a good movie or occasional TV show as much as the next person, but when I am not watching one personally, the electronic buzz the TV throw off when being watched by others is a background irritant. How much is that affecting our psyche? And what happens when, not if, the TV becomes a two-way transmission and receiver? Who will be watching us?

Personally, we are half-way there. Trying to clean up and make an old 5-acre farm productive again. Children learning the piano. Family meals whenever possible with high school schedules. We rip out the cable TV every January after the holiday season, then sign up again for football season. But Netflix has become a surrogate cable with all episodes available all the time. Might be time for a brick to go thru the TV set.

Kunstler hates anything modern, electrical, time-saving, life-enhancing. He prefers the old ways, the trudging into the snow with an ax to fell a tree, the long haul home by sled with firewood to warm one's cozy candle-lit abode. No machine made civilization for him, or us. He and his Back-To-Nature Police would not allow it -- for our own good.

Ayn Rand once predicted that the discredited Socialists of the 1950s would roll over into the Environmental Movement as a way to further their agenda of limiting and eventually eliminating individual liberty. She was right about the Environmentalists and wrong about the Socialists, the latter having been reinstated by the Democratic party and the idiotcy of American voters.

Since your comments are reduced to grammar and not content, you were incorrect in saying "With a wide margin even" which is an incomplete sentence. You should have written, "You won again and with a wide margin even."

Also re "sorry , sorry , sorry !" It is best not to leave a space between the ends of words and commas or exclamation marks.

Also "By the way. It is spelled "idiocy" is fragmentary. It would have been better as "By the way it is spelled "idiocy."

Always nice to help one another on these matters, and thanks for your corrections.